Redefining the role of the media agency

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CELEBRATE
Taking the new globally-developed Lucozade masterbrand positioning and making it contextually relevant and engaging at a local level.

THE CHALLENGE
Our challenge was to rapidly establish the new Lucozade promise brought to life through the “YES” messaging, and to contextualise its deeper meaning into the DNA of each individual brand. All the individual brand communications could then ladder up to a stronger Lucozade “voice”.

THE INSIGHT
The Lucozade brand had high levels of awareness and appeal, particularly among its core young male customers, but needed to make the Lucozade masterbrand positioning clear and relevant to their world. The most valuable consumers were ‘now activists’ – ruled by sociability, symbols and newness. Finding, absorbing and sharing content first was highly motivating for them. And no brand in the soft drinks category was delivering this.

THE IDEA
The big idea was simply to treat the launch not as an ad campaign, but rather the release of new content. The campaign was launched through a planned eco-system of activity, which defined the type and depth of communications we wanted to take place. This framework allowed us to prescribe the energy-flow behind each media channel’s role at each stage of the customer response to the campaign, rather than simply
stating which channels to buy. Within the eco-system, every piece of activity has an effect on everything else within it, ensuring early pull-through from our now
activists. Lucozade’s eco-system had 3 key areas that had to integrate and relate to one another to ensure a cohesive launch behind the new brand promise. The purpose of each phase was to generate consumer expression, not impressions, primarily judged by the success of the new Facebook profile.

The three phases were:

SEED

DISTRIBUTE

AMPLIFY

1. SEED
The basis of this was to launch in a big way, but in very select environments, leveraging the viral nature of our core consumers.
2. DISTRIBUTE
We made an event of the days around the launch day by dominating all key channels (including roadblocking the entry points to social media, solus ad breaks and multiple video news releases across TV, extensive use of online video ads and specific movie targeting in cinemas).
3. AMPLIFY
We switched to a higher frequency of different ad executions across TV and online video. Media partnerships provided new and exclusive content for Lucozade, which was published through the Facebook profile allowing our now activists to get this to their peers ahead of anyone else.

THE RESULTS

Our success is measured by the high number of most valuable consumers we are regularly engaging with “YES” through our Facebook profile. Within 6 months we went from 0 – 33,000 members, which was also the highest number of an Irish Facebook profile page within the CSD category. The profile was also ranked within the top 30 of Irish profiles within this time period. While these standard industry measures demonstrated massive success, the deeper social media expression measures were even more impressive. The activity achieved an interaction rate five times the industry average and an unlike rate a third of the general marketplace.

For more examples of great media work, you can get in touch with me on 01 271 2139

Ciaran Cunningham – CEO

As always, if you have any opinions- supporting or conflicting- on this post or related matters we’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to post replies below.

Carat recently partnered with IAB and Amarach research to try to gain a greater understanding into the habits of TV viewers while they’re watching TV. As we all suspected, TV viewers are spending rather a lot of time online while simultaneously watching TV, so our research was designed to quantify the extent to which this was happening and to dig a bit deeper into what’s now known as “media meshing” or “second screening”

The research showed that an impressive 78% of TV viewers go online while watching TV. Even more interesting were our findings into what they’re doing online while watching TV. While the majority (53%) are social networking, 40% are doing their banking and 34% are on Google looking for information or just surfing in general. In fact, social networking has been frequently credited with encouraging a revival of certain TV programmes, as viewers simultaneously engage with programmes via Twitter and Facebook, notice the number of programmes currently running with hashtags promoted on screen.

Interestingly for advertisers, 1 in 5 who are online while watching TV are actively searching for brands or information on brands they have seen on TV, making it important for advertisers to upweight search budgets around TV advertising. In addition, a high proportion of those surveyed are also searching online for the TV commercials they’ve seen or the music within these commercials. YouTube is the first place they go to try to find commercials, making YouTube an increasingly important channel as a support for TV.

This clearly showed that the effectiveness of TV campaigns can be amplified through complimentary online activity. Canny advertisers should be looking at other ways to drive interactions now, including but not limited to; treating youtube as a search engine, much like Google, to help distribute the message, and looking for improved methods of engagement like Shazam, if the music is catchy, or perhaps incorporating a twitter presence into sponsorship. To name just a few.

This research was published in conjunction with IAB Ireland and the full presentation is available here, or you can get in touch with us here at Carat to receive a copy of the full report.

The latest video from the band OK Go was released online on the 4th February and has already reached over 16,000,000 total views on YouTube as well as hundreds of blog posts and almost hundreds of thousands of Facebook shares.

They are most famous musically for their song “Get Over It” released in 2003, but their real fame came from their intricate music videos all filmed in one shot starting with “Here it Goes Again” which they also performed live at the MTV Awards in 2006.

From that point on they have been a shining example of how effective the digital world is at distributing good content.

Their most successful video to date is for “This too shall pass” featuring a Rube Goldberg machine designed and built by the band over the course of several months.To date it has had 34,000,000 views on YouTube, 1,900,000 shares on Facebook and 8,700 blog posts.

They are no strangers to partnering with brands- as the current video (which was made in partnership with Chevrolet) shows, and their incredibly impressive video for “All is not lost” which can only be properly viewed using Google’s Chrome browser.

Their use of digital for distribution is excellent and now the words “new video from OK Go” are enough to garner several million views within a number of days. But this is entirely due to the quality of the work. Every video has been expertly crafted (despite an intentionally very amateur feel to them) and have all had an inordinate amount of work and planning put into them.

If you build it, they will come – so long as what you build is impressive and people enjoy watching it.